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Friday, November 11, 2016

Skype for Business Cloud Connector Edition (CCE) is a set of 4 virtual machines delivered as an appliance.

Active directory domain controller

Holds Service pointers, Internal DNS used by CCE, Internal Certificates. This active directory do not share schema with your internal domains, it is separate and used by CCE only.

Skype for Business Edge Server

The Edge server is a multihomed virtual machine that talks to the Internet on "the outside" and it must be able to use external public DNS from the Internet.

Skype for Business Mediation Server

Terminates SIP trunks to/from the outside world (the SBC) and transcodes media.

Skype for Business Central Management Store

Holds information on the Topology used by Mediation and Edge.

CCE can be seen as a gateway between Office 365 and your own PSTN connection. Please note that CCE does not contain a Skype for Business Registrar, i.e. it is not possible to home users in CCE.

The presentation continued with PowerShell demos on how to configure Office 365 for CCE, how to configure a user for PSTN access, how to configure a Sonus SBC with integrated CCE, number manipulation and mulitsite configuration.

Why should we use an Session Border Controller (SBC) together with CCE?

With a SBC we can connect multiple trunks to a single instance of CCE and we can also handle analog devices such as fax machines. We can do additional transcoding, SIP message manipulation, TLS connections, DTMF, reduce latency and DDoS protection just to name a few advantages. An SBC will also allow us to use an existing infrastructure (trunks) so that we can migrate smoothly and retain a carrier contract.

Thursday, November 3, 2016

The presentation started with a demo of the Smartsheet integration with presence, conversations and meetings.

Next was Skype for Salesforce where Skype is built into the Salesforce GUI / Webpage featuring videocalling in Edge without a plugin with the call and editing in Salesfore happening in the same window.

Embedded video calling in Google Chrome using the WebRTC implementation in Chrome were demoed, using a "media provider" built into the Chrome browser, just as in Edge.

Web and Chat is cool, but voice still accounts for more than 60% of the traffic for most customer service organizations. Hence, "Trusted applications" in the cloud will be supported by a coming "Trusted applications API", which was demoed together with the WebSDK in the session. A demo featured an anonymous user in a web chat session with an agent who could bring in a second agent / expert and a consumer Skype healthcare bot via the Bot Framework. The demo also featured a PSTN call into a trusted application via Office 365 PSTN calling with DTMF signalling, basic IVR and agent routing.

UCMA will probably not be ported to the cloud, but WebRTC is on the roadmap for Skype for business (starting with Online)

Wednesday, November 2, 2016

At an event in New York and online Microsoft announced Microsoft teams today. Microsoft Teams Builds on Office 365 and adds a chat-based workspace to Office 365.

Microsoft Teams - a part of the Office 365 ecosystem

Microsoft Teams is threaded persistant chats or conversations where the Activity view can be seen as the "inbox" in Teams. A Team "channel" can be seen as the digital equivalent of an ad-hoc meeting in a normal Office environment. Moving images, emojis, stickers, or GIFs, can easily be pasted into team conversations. Microsoft Teams builds on Office 365 groups, and has built-in access to PowerBI, Graph, SharePoint, OneNote, and Skype for Business. A "team" is simply a group of people organized around a common goal, and a sharepoint site is automatically created for each new Team that is created in Microsoft Teams.

Bots are included in Microsoft Teams from start. T-bot can answer questions about the MicorosftTeams product, like: How do I create a channel? Who-bot can answer questions about people. Polly is a poll / voting bot can be used in conversations. Currently some 85 bots are available.

In general, a web browser is all you need to access Microsoft Teams and mobile clients are available as well.